So, whenever i've been in Bridge for a little while and want to do a full preview mode by hitting the spacebar I get the dark grey screen and after awhile "the spinning beach ball of death" appears. This continues until I have to force quit Bridge. When I restart bridge and try to do a new preview right away the same problem occurs imeditly.

I've tried to delete all the preffs both manually and automatically by holding down the option key during start up, but nothing helps. I've also installed the latest updates.

I'm on a pretty new Macbook Pro 2.53 GHz Intel i5 bought this summer with a SSD harddrive and 4gb of RAM if that is of interest.

I have the same problem. When I'm using Bridge for a while, the spacebar full screen preview stops working. It just shows a gray screen. It doesn't crash for me though. I have 8 GB ram and plenty of HD space so shouldn't be the issue.

Changing the video card in a macbook pro isnt really an option is it - especially not for $50-$100

You are right, not an easy option. The minimum requirement for CS5 is 256 MB VRAM on your graphic card. But for better performance you need at least 500 MB.

But to me it still seems a cache related problem.

Also make sure you have the preferences set to 'generate monitor sized previews' in the advanced tab. Using software rendering only helps if your minimum requirements for the graphic card are not good enough.

If they are from the same folder try and purge the cache for folder using the menu tools/cache/purge cache for folder.

And keep in mind that the folder needs to finish its caching first to before showing all proper results.